Sunday, November 27, 2016

January 22, 1938 - November 23, 2016 Joe (Joseph Carmine)
Esposito passed away peacefully in Calabasas, California, at 78. Joe was born
of Italian immigrants in Chicago, Illinois. He was a happy, jovial man who made
friends with everyone he met. Often his children were told "Your father is
the nicest man I've ever known!" An Italian through and through, he loved
to cook and entertain, nurturing family and friends, thriving in the laughter
and enjoyment around the table. His playful nature endeared him to many, and he
was gifted in reaching out and staying in touch. And, of course, music was a
great love¿ Best known as Elvis Presley's road manager and best friend, Joe and
Elvis met in the army in 1958, while stationed in Germany. They worked together
until Elvis' death in 1977. He also worked with Michael Jackson, The Bee Gees,
Karen Carpenter and John Denver. He has written multiple books about his life
with Elvis, and was a great source of stories and antidotes for Elvis fans
until the day he passed, constantly appearing at Elvis conventions and
celebrations. Joe was preceded in death by his wife, Martha (Gallub), and
survived by his three children, Debbie and Cindy - from his first marriage to
Joan (Kardashian), and Anthony - from his second marriage to Martha, and his
three grandchildren, Cody, Rebecca and Dylan. Private memorial only. Please
contact family at his email address. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made
in his memory to John Douglas French Alzheimer's Foundation (jdfaf.org).

Fritz Weaver, a Tony Award-winning character actor who
played a German Jewish doctor slain by the Nazis in the 1978 mini-series
“Holocaust” and an Air Force colonel who becomes increasingly unstable as the
nation faces a nuclear crisis in the 1964 movie “Fail Safe” died on Saturday at
his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his son-in-law, Bruce Ostler.

Mr. Weaver won a Tony in 1970 for his role in Robert
Marasco’s drama “Child’s Play” about the malevolent environment at an exclusive
Roman Catholic school for boys.

Mr. Weaver and Ken Howard played teachers of wildly
different temperaments who inevitably became adversaries. Mr. Weaver was the
fierce disciplinarian. Mr. Howard, as his easygoing rival, also won a Tony.

But winning the Tony did not catapult Mr. Weaver into
stardom. “What I remember is a vast silence from the phone,” he said, “because
people said, ‘We won’t offer it, now, because we can’t offer him enough
money.’”

From the 1950s on, Mr. Weaver was a familiar presence on
television shows like “Studio One,” “Playhouse 90,” “Mission: Impossible” and
“Murder, She Wrote.”

He appeared in two episodes of “The Twilight Zone” — “The
Obsolete Man” and “Third From the Sun,” in which he played a scientist who
plots to take his family aboard a rocket to escape earth before a nuclear war.

He was nominated for an Emmy for his performance in the
NBC mini-series “Holocaust,” playing Dr. Josef Weiss, the patriarch of a Jewish
family who is denied his livelihood, is sent to the Warsaw ghetto and then to
Auschwitz to die.

Mr. Weaver made his Broadway debut in 1955 in “The Chalk
Garden,” Enid Bagnold’s play about the woes of an aristocratic British family.
Mr. Weaver won laughs and a Tony nomination with his portrait of the fussy
household butler.

A review in The Boston Globe said: “Mr. Weaver boasts
sound basic equipment; a natural ease on the stage, aristocratic good looks and
a resonant baritone, which he attributes to a family line that boasts a number
of opera singers.”

Mr. Weaver went on to appear in a revival of Eugene
O’Neill’s “The Great God Brown” (1959) and the Phoenix Theatre’s 1960 staging
of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” in which he starred as the world-weary British
monarch.

His other Shakespearean roles included Hamlet, King Lear
and Macbeth. For the latter role, The New York Times said in 1973, Mr. Weaver
was almost unrecognizable, having transformed from “thin, fine-drawn,
long-fingered” into a “robust, burly Macbeth.’’

Mr. Weaver’s theater credits also included the 1979
revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price”; Lanford Wilson’s “A Tale Told” (1981),
part three of a trilogy about a feuding Missouri family, in which he played the
clan patriarch with what Frank Rich in The Times called “an often startling
mixture of pathetic senility and foxy viciousness”; and Mr. Wilson’s “Angels
Fall” (1982).

In later years Mr. Weaver turned increasingly to
voice-over work, serving as narrator of, among other specials, “The Rape of
Nanking” (1999) and “Unsung Heroes of Pearl Harbor” (2001), as well as many
shows on the History Channel.

One of his last roles was in the 2015 Adam Sandler film
“The Cobbler.” He also appeared in the 2016 film “The Congressman,” starring
Treat Williams.

Fritz William Weaver was born on Jan. 19, 1926, in
Pittsburgh, the son of John Carson Weaver and the former Elsa Stringaro.

After graduating from the University of Chicago, where he
majored in physics, he came to New York and enrolled in acting classes at the
Herbert Berghof Studio. In 1954 he made his Off Broadway debut in “The Way of
the World” at the Cherry Lane Theater.

Mr. Weaver’s first marriage, to Sylvia Short, ended in
divorce. He married the actress Rochelle Oliver in 1997. She survives him, as
do his daughter, Lydia Weaver; his son, Anthony; and a grandson.

He was often cast as an aristocratic villain. In “The Day
of the Dolphin” (1973), directed by Mike Nichols, Mr. Weaver played the head of
a shadowy company supporting researchers (George C. Scott and Trish Van Devere)
who are studying dolphin intelligence. His sinister goal was to use trained
dolphins to attach explosives to the presidential yacht.

In a 1988 interview with The Christian Science Monitor,
Mr. Weaver spoke about the challenges actors face.

“When you play the great roles, you get spoiled and think
you’ll have a whole career playing nothing but great roles, and of course you
can’t,’’ he said. “You play a lot of junk most of the time. Television is junk,
most of it.”

But he reveled in performing Shakespearean roles.

“The old boy — he’s the one who makes the maximum
challenge to the actor,’’ he said. “That high charge on all the lines that he
writes — you’ve got to measure up. You can’t just saunter into that stuff;
you’ve got to bring your whole life into it.”

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Paul Sylbert, Oscar-winning production designer for
'Heaven Can Wait,' dies at 88

Los Angeles Times

By Steve Marble

November 23, 2016

Paul Sylbert, an Academy Award winning production
designer who created the lighter-than-air atmosphere of God’s waiting room in
“Heaven Can Wait” and the white-on-white sterility of “One Flew Over the
Cockoo’s Nest”, has died at the age of 88 at his home outside Philadelphia.

Sylbert and his twin brother, Richard, were go-to players
in the 70s and 80s when directors like Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, Robert
Benton and John Frankenheimer went looking for someone to capture the visual
core of a movie. While Sylbert worked on finding the visual metaphors for
“Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Gorky Park”, his brother was helping shape the look of
“Chinatown” and “Reds.”

When he was working on “Rush,” the story of two desperate
cops hopelessly chasing after an elusive drug dealer, Sylbert spent weeks
searching for a a neighborhood — preferably on the outskirts of Houston — that
would capture the dark edges of the moody 1991 film. He settled on a badly
rutted road with ditch water rolling over the curbs and rusted barbed wire in front
of the homes. A petroleum plant blotted out the skyline, belching out steam and
smoke.

“There’s nothing that looks more like the mouth of hell
than a crackling plant when the gas flames are shooting into the air,” he
explained to Smithsonian Magazine in a 2008 interview.

Sylbert, who died Saturday , won an Oscar for his work on
“Heaven Can Wait” and was nominated for another for his production work with
Barbara Streisand on “Prince of Tides.” His other credits include “One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Kramer vs. Kramer, “The Drowning Pool”, “Baby Doll”
and Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man.” His career spanned nearly half a
century.

Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Sylbert and his brother were
nearly inseparable. They served in the same Army infantry unit in Korea and
attended the school of art at Temple University. When Sylbert landed a job at
CBS in New York, his brother found work over at NBC.

He arrived in Hollywood at a time when he felt the visual
fine-tuning of set production work was reasserting itself. If the 30s and 40s
had taken advantage of the elegance of L.A.’s Art Deco backdrop and the moody
side streets that lent themselves to film noir, many of the films of the next
two decades had retreated to sound stages or indulgent location shoots, Sylbert
believed.

“Hollywood fell asleep, the vessel was empty,” Sylbert
told the Times in 1990. “They were doing things by rote.”

Which would explain why he went to the trouble to track
down furniture covered with cigarette burns for the apartment of the chain-smoking
police inspector in “Gorky Park” or why his brother purchased 300 books —
handpicked Hemingway novels, Harvard classics, feminist Georgian poets — for a
single shot of the bookshelves in a home library in “Without a Trace.”

“Putting a film together is like composing music or
painting on a white canvas,” Sylbert told the Times. “Every addition affects
the whole.”

Sylbert also designed opera sets for the New York City
Opera Company and the summertime Festival of Two Worlds in Spoletto, Italy. He
also wrote and directed a feature film, ‘The Steagle”, the story of a college
professor during the Cuban missile crisis trying to live out all of his dreams.

“He was as smart and well-read as anyone I have ever come
in contact with, and all who knew him respected him,” said Hawk Koch, a film
producer who worked with Sylbert on “Heaven Can Wait” and “Gorky Park.”

At the time of his death, he was writing a book on the
craft of production design, his wife, Jeanette, said. She said he also was
teaching film courses at Temple and the University of Pennsylvania.

“He was a wonderful man who believed in fair play,
civility and courage, and was unafraid to say it like it was,” his wife said.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children,
Olivia and Christian. He was preceded in death by another child, Christopher.
His brother died in 2002.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Copiague resident Jerry Schatz, a former child actor who
appeared in several “Our Gang” comedies, often as a spoiled rich kid, and
co-starred opposite such screen luminaries as Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers and
Laurel and Hardy, died Wednesday morning of natural causes at the Long Island
State Veterans Home in Stony Brook at age 91, his daughter Renee Schatz Wolf
confirmed.

“He was a child actor, a disabled World War II veteran, a
Mason, a Shriner, an Odd Fellow, but most of all he was our dad,” Wolf said.

Most popular

Schatz, who was born in Chicago and acted under the
screen name Jerry Tucker, always downplayed his screen accomplishments.
“Growing up, I thought everybody worked in the movies,” Schatz told Newsday in
2013. “I had no idea there was an outside world.”

He earned his ticket to Hollywood at age 5 when his
father took him to a boxing match and had him enter the ring and recite “Gunga
Din.” The head of Paramount Pictures was in the audience and was taken with the
youngster.

Schatz’s screen debut — on loan to MGM — was in the
Buster Keaton comedy “Sidewalks of New York” (1931), which was followed by his
first “Our Gang” comedy, “Shiver My Timbers.” With his carrot-topped locks and
freckled complexion, Schatz fit in perfectly with the rest of the gang and
appeared in 14 shorts in the series, which was known as “The Little Rascals”
when shown later on television. In his favorite episode, “Hi, Neighbor” (1934),
he played a rich snob who uses his fancy fire engine to win the affections of a
pretty blond girl.

Schatz also appeared in some of the biggest movies of the
1930s including “Babes in Toyland” (1934) with Laurel and Hardy, “San
Francisco” (1936), “Captain January” (1936) with Temple and “Boys Town” (1938).

Still, Schatz was never enchanted with Hollywood, and in
1942 he joined the Navy as part of the demolition team aboard the destroyer USS
Sigsbee. “Jerry Tucker died at the age of 16, and Jerry Schatz was reborn in
the Navy,” Schatz said. “It’s not that being in the movies was anything that
was bad. That’s just not my life.”

He was awarded the Purple Heart after suffering a
permanent leg injury when a piece of shrapnel was caught in his leg during an
attack on his ship during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. “He talked about the
movies, but if you asked what he was most proud of, it was his Navy career,”
Wolf said.

Schatz and his wife, Myra, who died in 2012, settled in
Copiague in 1950, where he worked as an electrical engineer with RCA Global
Communications. He was also actively with several military-related groups,
including the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In June 2015, a portion of St. Ann’s
Avenue in Copiague was renamed Jerry Schatz Place in honor of his military
career and service to the community.

In addition to Wolf, Schatz is survived by his daughter,
Karen Duffy; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Funeral services will be held at 10 a.m. Friday in Powell
Funeral Home in Amityville.

The veteran Australian actor Peter Sumner joked last year
that he had a fair idea what would be written on his gravestone.

"TK-421 do you copy?"

Sumner, who has died aged 74 after a long illness, was
best known as the only Australian to work on Star Wars. And that was one of his
few lines playing Lieutenant Pol Treidum, an officer on the Death Star, in George
Lucas' 1977 classic sci-fi film.

It was just two days work - earning £60 a day - but it
resonated throughout Sumner's life, taking him to sci-fi conventions and
attracting thousands of fan letters over four decades.

But he also worked like so many well-known Australian
actors on Play School and acted in the Mick Jagger version of Ned Kelly, The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, the television series Spyforce and played Bill
Hayden in The Dismissal.

"He was best known for Star Wars and Play School but
he did so much more," said his wife, Lynda Stoner. "He did many
Shakespearean plays on stage. He toured a lot with David Williamson plays. He
did so many shows on the ABC with Jacki Weaver and Cornelia Frances and other
people. He did a lot of comedies. He did a lot of dramas. In the seventies, he
was barely off the ABC doing one show or another."

Sumner, who was also a writer, director and documentary
maker, was in England after travelling with his family when Star Wars was being
cast.

"I had an agent in London and she rang and said,
'There's this strange little American sci-fi movie and there are couple of days
work in it.' As we were broke, the first first thing I said was, 'How much?'

"She said, '£60 a day.' I said, 'I'll take
it.'"

Sumner went to Elstree Studios for the shoot.

"I was absolutely amazed at the sets that had been
built," he says. "On the first day, when the second or third
assistant took me up to the control room set that I was working in, I was
standing on the back wall when this man suddenly appeared at my side.

"His glasses were crooked and he had an old white
shirt and grey pants on. I thought he was an accountant of some sort.

"We got talking - being Australian always interests
people - and just as I was about to say, 'And who are you?', the first came
over and said, 'Mr Lucas, we're ready.' That was my meeting with George
Lucas."

Sumner also remembers meeting Harrison Ford, who later
became famous as Han Solo, on set.

"Lovely man," he says. "Bit distracted.

"But the one thing that did trigger me into thinking
maybe this is more than it seems was, passing through one of the sets, I
happened to notice this figure in a cowl reading.

"I realised it was Alec Guinness. He's a hero as far
as I'm concerned - a brilliant actor - so I thought, 'Wow, what would Alec
Guinness be doing in this movie?

"Either he's desperately in need of money or there's
more to this than meets the eye."

It was not till Sumner returned to Australia that Star
Wars became a blockbuster hit.

"People have often said to me I must have made a
fortune in residuals and I just laugh," he says. "I made £120 and
that was it.

"I've spent 10 times that answering letters from
fans around the world and sending them photographs."

Sumner is survived by Stoner and three children - son
Luke and daughters Kate and Joanna with first wife Christina Sumner.

About Me

Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1946 I have a BA degree in American History from Cal St. Northridge. I've been researching the American West and western films since the early 1980s and visiting filming sites in Spain and the U.S.A. Elected a member of the Spaghetti Western Hall of Fame 2010.